Movie Nation

“The Sea Beast” bolts off the screen with a photo-realistic CGI animated shipwreck and a bracing blast of high stakes mayhem as told by a plucky girl, reading a dime novel on sea serpents and those who hunt them — “Tales of Captain Crow” — to her fellow orphans.

Director Chris Williams of “Moana,” “Bolt” and “Big Hero 6,” and his co-writer fold in bits of “Treasure Island,” “Moby Dick” and “Pinocchio” into their tale of that age when the ships were wooden, the crews made of iron and the deep was filled with ship-devouring beasts destined to be hunted to extinction by crews using cannon, pistols and harpoons that they try not to call “harpoons” because we all know what they’re doing in a metaphorical sense — even the kids.

The beasts are a substitute for whales.

It’s not the movie’s abrupt inevitable turn towards “There’s got to be another way” in the age-old struggle between sailors and beasts, nor the gloriously and historically-defensible diverse crew chasing the last of these “beasts” in the “hunting” ship, The Inevitable that kind of lost me. It’s the whole “How to Train Your Dragon” without the laughs that it devolves into that make this Netflix outing something of a yawner.

The action is spectacular, the menace palpable and the “see things from the ‘hunted’ beasts point-of-view” angle touching, in a metaphorical way. But swap out the humorless sailors for funny, Scots-accented Vikings, and even a ten year old will recognize “We’ve SEEN this.”

Jared Harris brings gruff gusto the role of surly Captain Crow, with Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Sarah, his hyper-competent, tough, no-nonsense first mate.

But danged if the patriarchal skipper hasn’t ordained the foundling sailor and deadliest hunter Jacob (Karl Urban), whom he regards as “like a son” as his replacement on the bridge. First, though, Captain Crow has unfinished business with The Red Bluster, deadliest of the red-tails, one of many species of sea beasts that The Inevitable and its rivals hunt, at the behest of The Royals (“Downton’s” Jim Carter, and Doon Mackichan).

Meanwhile, orphan Maisie (Zaris Angel-Hator) finishes up her latest reading from “Tales of Captain Crow” to her fellow orphans, and makes her latest escape from the ever-so-nice orphanage. Her plan? To find the captain and throw in with his swarthy crew.

She only finds Jacob, on shore leave. And he’s all “A ship is no place for a kid,” which just means she’ll have to stow away to get on board.

Maisie’s efforts to intervene in the ship-vs-beast battle only get her and Jacob swallowed. And that’s how she befriends “Red” and everybody has to change her or his entire worldview.

“Maybe you can be a hero and still be wrong,” is the messaging here.

It’s more adult than you might think, but rarely jarringly-so. Generic, harmless enough and watchable, with a few touching moments — seeing the old harpoons sticking out of the “Dragon”/gecko designed beast — and plenty of violence.

But charm and humor are in shorter supply than you’d hope. There’s barely a funny moment in it, even though there are English-accented attempts at jokes about how often sailors say “Yarrrr,” and a cute baby beast is introduced, right on cue, in the later acts.

It’s better than some Netflix animated fare, but not original or fun enough to be up to the streamer’s gold standards in CGI entertainment for kids — “Klaus” or “The Mitchells vs. the Machines.”

Rating: PG, violence and lots of it

Cast: The voices of Karl Urban, Zaris-Angel Hator, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Jim Carter, Doon Mackichan, Dan Stevens and Jared Harris.

Credits: Directed by Chris Williams, scripted by Nell Benjamin and Chris Williams. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

For some reason, when I heard of sitcom mainstay Larry Storch’s passing at the grand old age of 99, this scene is what came to mind.

Blake Edwards had a bit of a big screen comeback after “10,” and the first fruit that Dudley Moore/Bo Derek/Julie Andrews sex comedy bore fruit was the skewering Hollywood farce, “S.O.B.”

Edwards’ Big Statement on the town where he made his living had lots of funny TV actors, and William Holden, Andrews (Mrs. Edwards’) and the scene stealing Robert Preston in a tale of shallow dad’s, venomous gossip journalists, alcoholic old timers, Dr. Feel goods and a director having a breakdown at the expense of his wife star (Andrews).

Storch stands out in the politically incorrect guru presiding over a funeral.

Nutty scene. Never get away with it today.

RIP, Mister Whoopie.

“Thor: Love and Thunder” had a great but not world beating Thursday night and Friday, $29 million in “previews” piling up to a $70 million Friday, and that points to a $140-150 million opening weekend, according to Deadline.com.

Exhibitor Relations was figuring over $150, based on the “Doctor Strange” calculus. It had a $36 million Thursday and opened with $187 million back in May.

Decent if not breathlessly swooning reviews from critics and fans were tamping down expectations for this lark with dark undertones directed by Taika Waititi, much as they did for “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”

“Taika” is trending, where fandom is waging war over “the romance” and the laughs, and assorted other issues related to the film, its gay pirate-friendly (Or not friendly enough?) director.

Whatever else is happening, Disney saturating TV with Marvel content and rolling two films out closely together in a Marvelverse that’s treading water after the end of the Avengers panderfests seem like the biggest issues.

Be a shame if the two best directors to sign on for recent Marvel movies, Raimi for “Strange,” Waititi with “Thor,” got blamed for finally exhausting the Marvel Mother Lode.

“Minions: The Rise of Gru” enters the weekend in the $170 million range with an expected strong holdover, maybe another $60-70 when all is said and done. It made $13.5 million on Wednesday alone. Over $10 on Thursday.

“Maverick” had another big Friday and is headed towards a $14.6 million weekend.

“Elvis” entered the weekend over $80 million, closing in on that first $100.

“Black Phone” will be close to $70 million by midnight Sunday.

Nice to see Freeman getting another detective thriller in before hanging it up.

Frank Grillo also stars with The Great Binoche in this July 29 release.

Gawd, not this again.

“Torture porn?” Wanton self-injury and exploding head slaughter set to the tune of “Ten Little Indians?”

It’s entirely possible the creators of this nigh-on-unwatchable “Death Count” know that no less than Agatha Christie perfected this plot, thanks to a novel with a seriously racist title. That count-down the-dead thing may be the weariest trope in horror.

At least we know that they know they’re copying “Saw” and “Hostel,” because characters mention that in this cheesy, derivative C-movie splatter fest.

Eight people wake up in separate cells in another mass murderer’s dungeon. They have exploding collars on their necks, TV cameras and monitors in their cells.

The Warden (Costas Mandylor, in cowl, beard and one-eyed mask) has a “game” for them to play — online and streamed, their success/survival in it predicated on online “likes.”

The imprisoned include teachers (Sarah French), administrators and others from this one particular school. Their “game” involves inflicting “a non-suicidal self-injury” with the snips, pliers, sledgehammer, whip, etc. in a box on their cell.

The coach protests about “sportsmanship” and “rules” and complains that “You think some sicko is gonna get off watching this?”

Coach (Wesley Cannon) must be from Tibet.

Outside, Michael Madsen plays the sick-joking, unexplained eyebrow-stitched detective trying to track down this murderous event, which is blowing up the police station’s phones, lighting up the internet and tying up a WHOLE lot of “missing persons” cases that just were filed.

Madsen has the Reaganesque dye job and the world weariness to repeat that line, “I’m gettin’ too old for this s—” like he means it.

It’s a stupid movie that’ll probably make you dumber, just by watching it. The voyeurism of the victims’ predicament extends to anybody who checks in on films like this just to watch the “cool” ways people are killed, although some fanboy out on how the makeup is applied to create gruesome injuries — and wait for the naked cleavage.

My favorite cheesy touch? The filmmakers try to show the world news media transfixed by these murders streamed in real time. So they get “actors” to stand in front of fake foreign network graphics and read, in bad Little Theatre Foreign-Accented English, their headlines.

Damn. That’s…funny.

There’s an anti-public schools subtext that slips in here, and precious little actual problem-solving by those about to die to figure out a way to survive all this. So there’s nothing at all for us to invest in.

Mandylor isn’t bad, pretty much every thing and everybody else is.

But at least it’s short.

Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Costas Mandylor, Sarah French, Devanny Pinn, Wesley Cannon Robert LaSardo and Michael Madsen.

Credits: Directed by Michael Su, scripted by Michael Merino and Rolfe Kanefsky. A Mahal Empire release.

Running time: 1:22

Every now and then a debut feature film comes out that reminds you that not everybody dying to direct a movie is a slave to genre. Some filmmakers love actors and how they can touch, move and even inspire an audience.

“A Love Song” is an autumnal romance starring two of the best character actors in the business. If nothing else had gone right in Max Walker-Silverman’s first feature, the fact that he put screen veterans Dale Dickey and Wes Studi in the spotlight stands him in good stead. They make the showcase he paired them up in a lovely elegy on loneliness, loss and the rose-colored memories of youth.

Dickey was 15 years and scores of credits into her career when “Winter’s Bone” transformed her raw, weathered looks into a one of the most instantly-recognizable faces in film (“Hell or High Water”) or TV (Netflix’s “Unbelievable”). She stars as a solitary soul camping out by a Colorado lake in her ancient Shasta trailer.

Faye drinks her beer at room temp, makes her coffee from lake water, traps giant crayfish to eat and keeps to herself on this campsite in the heart of Nomadland. There’s vintage country blues on the radio, all sorts of flora, fauna and star-gazing she masters thanks to a couple of Audubon guides, and the occasional visit from the friendly young horse-riding postman (John Way). He’s important, because Faye wrote a letter. Any day now, she’s expecting a reply, or a visit from a high school flame from these parts.

Other nomads camp nearby, but well out of eyesight, not spoiling her mountain peak view or daily nature rambles. But Faye has her routine and her eye on the calendar. She’s giving this guy until mid-September to show.

The Oscar-winning Studi, a Native American screen icon since “Dances With Wolves,” “Last of the Mohicans” and “Geronimo,” is that guy. He shows up with a dog, a guitar and a lot of memories, most of them bittersweet.

Walker-Silverman keeps the dialogue spare and lets these two tell their stories with their faces and a sort of genteel shyness. It takes few words, a few looks and a few reminiscences to get them from “You know me?– “I don’t know.” to “Look at you. Look at us.”

The film is adorned with other lovers — a gay couple (Michelle Wilson and Benja K. Thomas) to pop the question — and a pleasantly cutesy quintet of siblings looking to rebury their patriarch, with the little girl (Marty Grace Dennis ) in their cowboy-hatted ranks their designated spokesperson. Faye’s parked on an unmarked grave, which requires a little good-mannered finessing.

Faye’s story is the one we’re following, the one wondering, “Reckon you can still love something that ain’t there no more?” It’s a fine, compact and soulful turn, on a par with Frances McDormand’s “Nomadland” performance. Studi adds more awkward grace to the proceedings, and a guitar lesson that leads to a sweet duet, Michael Hurley’s “Be Kind to Me,” a popular tune from their (@1971) high school years.

I’m taking the liberty of reviewing this slight and scenic cinematic chamber piece a few weeks before it opens, because it’s worth asking about and asking for at your local cineplex.

“A Love Song” is a lovely, valedictory film for two of the best actors of their generation, so it’s worth the effort you make to track it down. Any time a movie maker crafts something this gentle and fine for two wonderful players who rarely get the spotlight is to be celebrated.

Rating: PG

Cast: Dale Dickey, Wes Studi.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Max Walker-Silverman. A July 29 Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:21

This award winner looks charming and bittersweet.

Aug. 12 from Strand Releasing.

A father tries to check himself and his family out of a civilization he sees as hopelessly corrupt and doomed in “Costa Brava, Lebanon,” a parable of parenting and pollution set in Lebanon “in a near future.”

Co-writer/director Mounia Aki takes on “Mosquito Coast” themes for a debut feature whose ironic title — the “real” Costa Brava is the northern Spanish Riviera — reminds us that “paradise” can be anywhere, and that you don’t save paradise by checking out of the real world as an escape.

Aki, who once directed a short film on Beirut’s garbage crisis, uses that as the backdrop of this story of two people who met at a street protest, but years later have put their placards down and fled to the mountains, “the last green space” in the country. Walid (Saleh Bakri) and the former pop star Souraya (Nadine Labaki), their teen daughter Tala (Nadia Charbel) and irrepressible pre-tween Reem (Geana Restom) raise their own vegetables and chickens, off the grid with his mother (Liliane Chacar Khoury) on a mountain oasis that’s been in his family for years.

“Beirut will never change,” he says (in Arabic with English subtitles) of their former hometown, hot and polluted and overrun with trash as it drifts from crisis to crisis.

But Beirut’s problem is about to be dumped into their backyard. The harbinger of it is this statue they see as it is set up on land Walid didn’t even realize his moved-to-Norway sister had sold. The statue? “It’s of the president,” a functionary, Tarek (François Nour). Yes, they’re that far out of the loop. Still, it’s not exactly a good likeness.

The country has bamboozled foreign investors for yet another “save Lebanon from itself” project, a “green” eco-friendly waste dump carved out of undeveloped land and literally in their front yard.

It doesn’t matter that Walid and pretty much any countryman polled on the street knows how this will play out. “Green” is just “a PR stunt.” an environmental disaster is being visited upon them all, with dust, plastic bags of plastic garbage, heavy machinery and all-night-lights. An election is coming, and the debacle won’t become obvious until after election day. But taking pictures for his “lawsuit” is all Walid is willing to do about it. And yelling at his sell-out sister (Yumna Marwan) by phone.

They won’t “take a bribe” to leave, won’t sell out. We’ll see who blinks first.

Aki uses this struggle as the ultimate test for a family — a wife who misses their old cosmopolitan life and her notoriety, a husband lost in dogma, unable to reengage with the world, a mouthy little girl who idolizes him, ordering workers to “LEAVE” and throwing fruit at them when they don’t, and an isolated teenaged daughter who takes a shiny to hunky Tarek, who isn’t above returning the attention.

Salty, jaded, seen-it-all and supposedly dying — or emigrating to Colombia — grandma seems like the only one who isn’t taking sides.

Walid is “filling (Reem’s) head with horror stories” about the state of the planet and the nightmare of Beirut as a place to live. Mom is flattered by the attention of garbage workers who remember her pop career. And granny isn’t above cadging smokes off older workers, letting them use their bathroom during construction and shrugging off the statement that makes to the corrupt and their corrupted work force.

That’s no way to win a stand-off, sister.

As in “Mosquito Coast,” Bakri gives us a sense of Walid tilting at windmills, with the kids rebelling against it. But Labaki’s force-of-nature Souroya gives us the impression that she could shout down her “eccentric” husband at any moment and move this mountain, or them off of it.

A mix of overt shouting matches and subtler moments illustrate this war of wills, ideologies and parenting styles. And the odd hallucinatory reverie reminds the characters, and the viewer, that try as we might, there’s no wishing a big problem away when it comes bulldozing and dynamiting at your door.

If you want something to change, you’ve got to get back in the fight, back on the barricades, back in heroic light every parent wants their children to see them in.

Rating: unrated, mild violence, sexuality, smoking, profanity

Cast: Nadine Labaki, Saleh Bakri, Nadia Charbel, Geana Restom, François Nour and Liliane Chacar Khoury

Credits: Directed by Mounia Akl, scripted by Mounia Akl and Clara Roquet. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:44

James Caan, Vito Corleone’s toughest son and Buddy the Elf’s soft touch dad, has died. An old school hardcase who worked pretty much right to the end, he was 82.

“Thief,” “Gardens of Stone,” “The Godfather,” he walked away from good parts and seemed to have as many foibles as anybody who ever attained star status. But he was one of a kind.

Talented people wanted to work with him, even if he wasn’t the nicest guy to deal with on the set. I remember him dismissing “For the Boys,” and keeping Bette Midler, a packed LA cinema and a big band waiting for the premiere, one of a couple of times I interviewed him.

A lot of long “bathroom” breaks in that era in Hollywood.

That British series on movies and the star system that contrasted Caan with gladhander hack Schwarzenegger made Arnold look like a putz and Caan a bitter egomaniac.

And then there was William Golding, Hollywood’s most in demand screenwriter in his day, taking on adapting Stephen King’s “Misery,” not for King or future Oscar winner Kathy Bates or director Rob Reiner. But for Sonny.

RIP.

If you see veteran screen heavy Kim Coates in a velour dinner jacket in a thriller, you can’t go far wrong figuring “Well, he’s playing the Devil.” Wherever his career’s taken him — “Waterworld,” “Black Hawk Down, “Sons of Anarchy” — his look in his mature years can be sinister to the point of satanic.

But his presence is a puzzlement in the thriller “Neon Lights,” a movie so obscurant that even its title makes little to no sense.

We see him growling into the ear of a tech tycoon (Dana Abraham, who scripted this) just before the soft-voiced twitcher is interviewed on TV, where he melts down.

He’s whispering in Clay’s ear as he readies to meet his long-estranged family at a remote 1920s mansion. Is this man “the staff” of the mansion, a particularly pushy “I call, you answer” investor? An apparition in Clay’s head? A demon?

Then we notice that he has a reflection, that others seem to see him even if they don’t seem to know who or what he is any more than we do. And we puzzle some more.

The timid, cracking-up Clay tries to convince bully brother Benny (René Escobar Jr), Benny’s wife (Brit MacRae), other low-life brother James (Stephen Tracey) and niece Blair (Erika Swayze) that he just wanted to reconnect, to show them a swell time now that’s he doing well.

But he’s shell-shocked, “off the grid” as his company preps for an IPO, with rumors he may “lose my company.” And this fellow in the dinner jacker keeps muttering “Into the shadows Clay must go” and “You need to deal with your problems like a man.“

As we’ve seen Clay, shaken and bloodied in the film’s opening shot, we can guess what that might entail. His “personal demons” might be these generally unpleasant relations visiting him.

They just want to know “Why are we here?” and “You losing your marbles, bro?”

The script obscures the relationships, who exactly connects to whom, with characters not necessarily looking like each other and Blair calling those we assume to be her parents by their first names.

Clay is baited and bullied, people start to go through some things and Clay — seen in intermittent moments of psychotherapy and physical therapy — keeps telling himself “I’m not crazy, I’m not crazy.”

The Bangladesh-born Abraham, raised in Canada, is a young bit player who wrote and helped round up the cash for this star vehicle, which is basically a showcase for him playing whimpering timidity, mental mania and meltdowns.

All well and good, or at least adequate. But as a screenwriter his star vehicle has organizational problem and a twisty story in which all the energy is devoted to keeping those twists from being obvious.

The group dynamic he sets up is promising, the “What’s REALLY going on?” solutions a lot less interesting, bordering on nonsensical.

And Abraham, who has a sort of Bangladeshi nebbish Michael Stuhlbarg vibe, does well enough by this character’s twitches, persecution complex and cowering. But Clay isn’t remotely the most compelling character in a move about Clay, what’s in his head or what might really be happening to him.

Coates reminds us of this every time he’s on the screen. He’s a riveting presence, even in the worst movies. “Neon Lights” isn’t necessarily one of those. But it’s close.

Rating: R for violence, language, some sexual content and drug use.

Cast: Dana Abraham, Brit MacRae, Erika Swayze, Stephen Tracey, René Escobar Jr. and Kim Coates.

Credits: Directed by Rouzbeh Heydari, scripted by Dana Abraham. An eOne/Momentum release.

Running time: 1:34